On tour: Meet the author Margaret Drabble

UK author Margaret Drabble is touring Australia in March, appearing at the Perth and Adelaide writers festivals. Her 17th novel, The Pure Gold Baby (Text), was published in 2013.

What would you put on a shelf-talker for your book?
No idea!

What are you reading right now?
Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry (various imprints). 

Which book do you always recommend?
Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (Fourth Estate).

Which book made you wonder what all the fuss was about?
The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie, various imprints). Great novel, wrong kind of fuss. 

What’s the best book you’ve read that no-one’s ever heard of?
Bernardine Bishop’s Unexpected Lessons in Love (John Murray). 

What was the defining book of your childhood?
Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte, various imprints). 

Hardback, paperback or digital?
I read all three, but mostly digital these days. 

If you were a literary character you’d be … 
Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (George Eliot, various imprints). 

What’s your favourite book adaptation (film, television or theatre)?
Emma Thompson’s 1995 film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen, various imprints). 

What’s your favourite section of the bookstore?
Fiction.  

Facebook or Twitter?
Neither. 

In 50 years’ time books will be … ?
Appearing in formats not yet invented; readily available to the blind, the ageing and the very young; in multiple languages; and with even more amazing inbuilt dictionaries, maps and reference books. Traditional books will survive on the shelf, but with more discrimination and a sense of the special.  

Category: Features